Our phone numbers have become an essential part of our digital footprint and more and more companies, apps, and services are using them daily to establish and verify our identities.
Just remember how many apps request phone number confirmation when you switch devices, using it to verify your identity and grant you access to all kinds of personal accounts, from social media and email to e-commerce.
Apart from major international companies, private individuals can also exploit billions of phone numbers floating in cyberspace to obtain valuable information about their owners. You can do this through a process called reverse phone lookup.
Apart from personal curiosity, this utility can be used to stop some unwanted behaviors, advance your business, protect your family members, and avoid falling victim to all kinds of frauds and phone scams. Keep reading to learn which common problems can be solved with a timely reverse phone lookup.
Identifying Unknown Phone Numbers
How many times did you find a crumpled piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it and had no idea why you had it or who it belonged to? Is it a potential business opportunity, that girl/guy you met at a bar two days ago or just an irrelevant number you never intended on using anyway? With a reverse phone lookup, you can check any number in a matter of seconds and prevent important contacts from ending up in the trash.
Stopping Prank Calls
Even though they can be quite creative and downright ingenious, prank calls are still a nuisance that distracts you from your daily activities, especially if they occur regularly. On rare occasions, they might even contain threats, explicit sexual advances, and other disturbing connotations.
With a reverse phone lookup, you can easily discover the identity of your harasser simply by entering their number. From there, you can either face them yourself or contact the authorities. In most cases, the prank calls will stop the moment you utter the person’s name the next time they call you.
Avoiding Unwanted Calls
Receiving endless telemarketing calls is a huge waste of time, even if you refuse to hear the entire pitch. It gets even worse when you see a bunch of missed calls but do not recognize the numbers. A reverse phone lookup will help you filter out the telemarketers and know exactly which numbers to add to your contact list and which to avoid. This will also prevent you from missing important calls thinking people are trying to sell you something.
Researching Call History
With a reverse phone lookup, you can review all the numbers on your family phone bills and investigate the ones you do not recognize. Knowing who your family members are communicating with will provide you with peace of mind in some cases and indicate a problem you have to address in others.
Avoiding Phone Scams
A reverse phone lookup is an excellent tool every time you notice a suspicious missed call, voicemail or text message inviting you to call or message back. Additionally, you can use it to verify the identity of your caller claiming representation of a certain company or service. New and creative phone scams are being invented on a regular basis and using a reverse phone lookup to verify someone’s sales pitch or avoid high connection and per-minute rates is what gives us a distinct advantage over elaborate fraudulent attempts.
Discovering The Location Of Your Caller
Apart from the caller’s name and associated business ventures, some reverse phone lookup services will also provide you with their location and even approximate age. This option is especially useful if you want to find someone’s address quickly without calling them to ask. For example, if your doctor refers you to an unfamiliar specialist, you can discover their location and find out all about them in just a few clicks.
Screening Potential Employees
When a job applicant sends you a CV, their phone number will most certainly be included, which allows you to perform a more thorough screening of the most promising candidates. Apart from verifying the validity of the provided number, you will also gain access to a lot of actionable information and determine whether a person makes a good fit for your company.
Online Shopping
Before making any type of financial commitment to unbranded online sellers and retailers, it is always a good idea to check their phone number and see if the results match the provided data. High ratings and positive user reviews can be faked quite easily, so the only bulletproof way to verify the legitimacy of your online seller is to reverse their phone number and find all the relevant information yourself.
Which Numbers Can Be Reversed?
All phone numbers are susceptible to reverse phone lookups, including landline residential numbers, wireless numbers, fax numbers, and even prepaid phone numbers.
Having said that, there is a rising level of difficulty involved, so residential numbers are typically the easiest to reverse, business lines are a bit more challenging, and cellular phone numbers are traditionally the hardest to find information on. Relevant factors that might help your search include things like how frequently the number was given out and the age of the telephone line itself.
What Information Can Reverse Phone Lookups Reveal?
Depending on your chosen reverse phone lookup service, you will be able to discover:
- Validity – Check if certain phone numbers are real or not.
- Carrier type – Since we are unable to tell the difference between mobile and landline carriers simply by viewing the number, this utility allows you to differentiate between the two.
- Country – Identifying the country where your missed calls originated is especially important for preventing popular phone scams.
- Social media info – If a particular number is linked to any social media accounts, you will be able to retrieve a lot of valuable information by discovering someone’s Google, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profiles.
- Messenger data – If your service provider can establish a link between a phone number and certain messenger apps (Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram…), you can also obtain the owner’s profile photo and the timestamp of their last visit.
Bottom Line
Performing a reverse phone lookup is extremely easy and fast. It is one of the most convenient ways of discovering who is calling you in a few clicks (or taps). Whether you want to stop a serial prankster, check who your family members are communicating with or simply learn more about a certain caller, you will find all the required information online in mere seconds.
Although you cannot exactly receive information in real-time like with Caller ID, a reverse phone lookup still provides you with a wide variety of useful data that you can use in any number of ways, so if you have not used it so far, we hope this exhaustive guide managed to point out the value of this service and that you might give it a try in the future.